J. Gordon Harris - Biblical Perspectives on Aging

Biblical Perspectives on Aging

God and the Elderly

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First Edition published by Augsburg Fortress.

Undesignated translations of Bible verses are the authors own and designated ones are from NRSV 1991,1989,47,48.

Excerpts from J. G. Harris. Spiritual Well-Being. Maturity, and Aging in L. Eugene Thomas and Susan A. Eisenhandler (Eds.). Aging and the Religious Dimension reprinted with permission. Copyright 1994, North American Baptist Seminary.

Excerpts adapted from Biblical Hermeneutics and the Aging Experience: The Art of Moral Imagination by J. Gordon Harris, Research on Adulthood and Aging: The Human Science Approach, L. Eugene Thomas (Ed.), by permission of the State University of New York Press. Copyright 1989, State University of New York. All rights reserved.

Cover design by Jennifer M. Gaska.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harris, J. Gordon.

Biblical perspectives on aging: God and the elderly / J. Gordon Harris.-2nd ed.

p.cm.

ISBN: 978-0-7890-3537-0 (hard: alk. paper)

ISBN: 978-0-7890-3538-7 (soft : alk. paper)

I. Older people in the Bible. 2. Older people-Middle East. 3. Older people--Palestine. I. Title.

BS680.A34H37 2007
270.0846dc22

2007028836

Walter Brueggemann

Gordon Harris, PhD, ThM, is Distinguished Professor of Old Testament Emeritus at North American Baptist Seminary. In addition to being a pastor, missionary, Lions district governor, and retired Army National Guard chaplain, Dr. Harris has served as an Academic Vice President and Director of Doctoral Studies. His teaching and research concentrates in the areas of Old Testament studies and gerontology with a focus on current issues affecting and future trends in ministry and aging persons. Dr. Harris is also the author of Joshua: New International Biblical Commentary as well as numerous articles on aging which have appeared in, among others, Koinonia Review, New Interpreters Bible Dictionary, and Hebrew Studies.

Current discussions in biblical theology make it clear that the old distinction between what is meant and what it means is no longer workable. There has been a legitimate concern for contemporaneity that was, until recently, unthinkable that new legitimacy has come about for two reasons. First, attention to the canon means that the Literature is not exclusively kept in early or original context, but is heard and permitted to have its say in a variety of contexts, including our own. Attention to canon has shown that this is normative literature which moves past one initial context into many other contexts. Second, the emergence of contextualization in interpretation has helped us see that texts are heard differently in different contexts, depending on circumstances, methods, and interests. Although canon and contextualization appear to go in antithetical directions, both of them together have permitted the Bible to be interpreted around fresh questions.

To be sure, there is a danger in asking questions of the text that are our questions rather than those of the text itself, but even highly disciplined critical scholarship has tended to focus on questions that are essentially alien to the text. Recent contemporary study appears to be more subjective than conventional critical study, but it is clear that in both cases the social context of scholarship has helped determine the agenda for research. There are obviously no proper questions to ask the text. The questions arise in the process of interpretation only. This is neither a situation for despair as if we do not know how to proceed nor an invitation to indifference, as any question is as good as any other. It is rather, an opportunity to focus in fresh directions that may open up the text in new ways.

Professor Harris has undertaken just such an investigation around a fresh question. His book is deeply rooted in critical study and offers an amazing amount of fresh data of a historical-critical kind. However, it is clear that he has not lingered on these matters. He has ranged over the entire canon and has considered texts outside the canon. It is equally clear that his question on the elderly is contextualized in our own social setting in which people are living longer at the very time when old social networks of human care and valuing have become less effective. These networks seem more and more dysfunctional exactly when they are needed. Freedom with the entire canon and freshness from context characterize this study.

One way in which biblical theology is now pursued is by sustained consideration of a single theme throughout the Bible. The Overtures to Biblical Theology series has done this in a number of cases including blessing (Westermann), death (Bailey), possessions (Johnson), suffering of God (Fretheim), faithfulness (Sakenfeld), and land (Brueggemann). In some ways, Harris continues that enterprise.